Our next update to the Kerika software, scheduled for release this weeekend, will have a bunch of minor styling updates — over a hundred styling changes, in fact.

Most of these are fairly subtle; it’s quite likely you will not notice over 90% of them at all, because this new release is really a UI cleanup effort rather than a big feature release.

Over the past couple of years Kerika had acquired some “UI crud”: little inconsistencies in the fonts, colors, and interactions that had build up over time as you release new features, and we have been releasing new functionality every 4-6 weeks for over 3 years now. It’s like barnacles on an otherwise beautiful wooden boat…

For example, we found there were minor variations in shades of grey throughout the app: a light-grey shading in one place was off by an octect or two from a light-grey shading in another place. A tooltip was missing from one button here or there, or a tooltip wasn’t phrased as well as it could have been.

Taken individually, these are very trivial indeed — and, unless you examine the entire UI with a magnifying digital color meter, like we did, you wouldn’t have found these tiny inconsistencies, but they can have a cumulative effect that makes the UI seem vaguely fuzzy. (Just like barnacles, if left un-scrapped, can slow down even the most beautiful boat.)

The most visible change we made is the card details display: what you see when you open up a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board

This display is cleaner than what we used to have: it has a more consistent appearance with the rest of the Kerika user interface, and gives equal prominence to all the user interface elements within this dialog — because all of these elements are, in face, equally important to users. Our previous design gave undue prominence to Details, Attachments and Chat, which reflected nothing more than the historical evolution of the Kerika software; now, everything about a card is equally accessible.

The layout is also a lot cleaner: unnecessary decoration has been eliminated, and the overall style is more “flat” (i.e. in keeping with Microsoft’s Metro/Modern design styling, which even Apple has now adopted for iOS 7).